In a season 5 episode of the 1990s sitcom staple Boy Meets World, protagonist Cory Matthews is forced to embrace change. As he prepares to graduate from high school, he hyper-fixates on he and his friends’ local hotspot, Chubbie’s, being transformed into a pirate-themed restaurant in the blink of an eye.
Despite the lesson being mightily learned by episode’s end, we never revisit this location again throughout the series— whereas, in reality, a place can shape our childhood or young adult selves, then subsequently become entirely new institutions that still exist in the area we call home. Thus, we have no choice but to accept such in conjunction with the next chapter of our lives being actively written.
Speaking of the unavoidable: you may have heard by now that Play Like a Pro Indoor Sports Facility, just off of Expressway Drive North in Hauppauge between Exit 55 and Exit 56, has begun remodeling itself as a broader multipurpose event space called “Gotham.” Give or take a few head-scratches upon learning so through initial word-of-mouth, locals across many generations proudly celebrate such a happenstance ungrudgingly.
Once the place to go for your ball club’s winter workouts, your dodgeball fixes, sun-protected summer camps or arcade-and-pizza combo birthday party, “P.L.A.P.’s” owner, Matt Guiliano, 50, of Ronkonkoma, reached a point of no return in recent years.
Twenty years earlier, as an in- demand baseball instructor fresh off a minor league career spent with the Philadelphia Phillies, Milwaukee Brewers, Toronto Blue Jays and Long Island Ducks organizations, he bought out what was known as “Year-Round” and made it his own in 2004.
Is it a haunted house? Is it a nightclub? Is it both, somewhere in between, or none of the above?
Needless to say, Matt, at some point along the way, decided that it was time to start saying goodbye to baseball, and therefore, hello to something else.
Think of how many games of telephone have quickly gone awry, leading you to believe just about everything you’ve heard without ever once gathering the truth directly from the source.
The Messenger needed to have the record set straight with a look- see for itself, and we’re grateful to have been provided the opportunity to visit Guiliano and his team amidst renovation for an all-access tour. The facility is vastly different from our memory of it, our formative years spent learning within these walls how to break baseballs and batting cage “L” screens with sheer Cespedian force.
Of course, that was at Play Like a Pro. Now, we’ve traveled to Gotham to discover exactly what these parts’ Dark Knight is up to; and why.
The results? Something to write home about, indeed.
‘Baseball Is My Old Life’
A decade ago, the minor league middle infielder-turned- local business proprietor saw a window for alternative income.His esteemed sports facility where local ballplayers and entire teams would purchase tokens or cage space in exchange for tune-ups saw its annual revenue start to decline, and such a downtick in performance needed to be rectified.
The antidote he introduced was the first of many “culture-shocks” he would bring to the facility over the years — seasonal Haunted Houses running figuratively, and literally, perpendicular to recreational playing turf. More dominoes began to fall as he, in turn, fell out of love with baseball, or rather, what the game had turned into. “My love for baseball is just ripped out of my heart,” Guiliano confessed. “I just don’t like it anymore. It’s my old life. Now, I’m 50, and trying to reinvent myself.”
Through with the perceived predictability of his place, Matt wasn’t sure exactly what else it could be. As he searched for a mental-erase marker, the drawing board had begun to ready itself to supplant “P.L.A.P’s” familiar baseball vibe with a mixture of all-things macabre and music video-ready.
“I have the space here. I didn’t know what to do in that room [formerly a workout gym facility across from ‘his’ cage]. I’d have my friends over and DJ, my friend would DJ in the room. We’d put some speakers in there. My partner with the haunt does plays — you can fill that room, 20 tickets, $20 dollars apiece, 2 shows, $800 dollars… then I had these clowns that work for me – legit clowns – do shows…”
“It’s nothing I would have imagined talking about from this desk 10 years ago. It was all baseball, all of the time.”
As his acclaimed “Chambers of Hell” haunted house expanded beyond October and its neighboring months, so too did its reach. It’s currently ranked the 39th best Haunted House in America, and his new five-year plan involves attaining the number-one spot.
Fifty-one actors walked through a “full-contact, no touching” haunt held once in his building wherein waivers were signed; the presence of heat was felt apparent as authentic performers whispered to blindfolded participants how they “love the smell” of fire and burning people alive. Guiliano liked this show, but was not satisfied. He thought they could push the envelope even further within the “nitty gritty parameters.”
“I want the people immersed immediately,” he thought. “They’re not nervous enough.” He followed up with a backdoor entryway “haunt,” rather than front-door, and cut out guests’ ability to chitter- chatter prior to being ushered into the haunt. In a revised execution of the same premise, no talking was permitted from the jump. People were “bagged” and “auctioned off.”
“Full contact scares a lot of people,” Guiliano admits, “we’re not over the top. We get you scared, but it’s controlled. We’re looking at 1% of people— but I said, ‘if we change the show, and make it a play that happens in the haunt, we’ll get people back.’”
And they did. More people were involved, “scare actors” first introduced on video now seemingly emerging from the screen to interactively torment their senses- jolted “victims.” “It’s like being inside a horror movie, and watching the scene unfold.”
Though the haunted house endeavor was already long- unfolding as it’s grown from that renegade experiment it started out as into the bona fide juggernaut it is today, at the top of last year, Guiliano was still juggling a clientele’s worth of hitting lessons alongside his fellow Play Like a Pro instructors.
‘A New Drive’
That all changed in March 2022, his heartsickness for the sport having reached its boiling point. He suffered a heart attack, as he exclusively revealed to The Messenger— and called it two nights earlier with his partner, Angela.
“I said, ‘Babe, I gotta get out of this business. This place is going to give me a heart attack.’ She said, ‘Matt, relax,’ and I said, ‘I’m telling you, this place is going to put me in the ground.’”
Two days later, Guiliano woke up at 6:30 a.m. with tightness in his chest. Through sweat and dehydration, he’d wind up falling to his bedroom floor. By the time the ambulance arrived, he couldn’t breathe and could barely move, the pain having made its way to his neck. His eyes were closed as medics assisted him en route to the hospital, throwing out terms like “cardiac arrest” and “cutting his clothes off.”
In this moment, Guiliano prayed to those he’s lost.
“Grandma, grandpa, I’m here… I’ve had a good life, if you’re ready to take me… I’m talking to Mr. Ambro (the late Bob Ambrosini of Connetquot High School, Guiliano’s coach/mentor and alma mater, respectively),” Guiliano recalled, through tears, “and then they put the stent in and I was fine.”
Anyone who knows Guiliano knows he’s as colorful and expressive as they come. His in-person and social media personalities are a match made in “here’s what I’m thinking, here’s what I’ve been through” heaven. And yet, Guiliano only told his close circle of his brush with death up until this point.
Ultimately, he cited it as a silver lining: to stop seeing his life and allotment in terms of its limitations. Rather than defeatedly plow ahead as a cynical baseball lifer, he re-opened up the part of the mind that first fell in love with the concept of sport, when it was just play and pure unadulterated joy, and not heartache literally incarnate.
In doing so, he’s allowed himself to be struck by a carpe diem-esque bolt of lightning you only ever hear about in the movies. This play could be as youthfully exciting to him as its original iteration was to his now teenaged-kids, who’d visit dad at work back in the day and leave with precious memories of playing hide and seek with their family and P.L.A.P employees alike.
Over a year later, “Gotham Immersive Event Space’s” exterior has earned an all-black paint job— though the lead is so buried it’s downright mummy-entombed. The lobby and main area are now a collective haunted hellscape, its genesis built off of Guiliano borrowing what he learned from the ballfield and reapplying what he learned there elsewhere.
“All those skills you learned in baseball, they’re working here because it’s part of what shapes your life, and the role you play on a team. You build that team, and what’s best for your team. You’re the manager,” Guiliano spoke, noting his collaboration with special effects guru, Rob Frankenberg. Guiliano has tasked the horror flickaphile with turning his creative concoctions into surround sounds and set pieces synonymous with jump scares found in serial killer cinema and combat video game maps.
“Rob came over the house shortly after the heart attack, and we were talking. I covered up the tattoo on my back, the baseball tattoo I was very proud of. It’s almost like, ‘that part of your life is really over,’ I said. ‘You’re shifting gears now.’”
When you start removing ink from your body, you know that more is in store for the cutting room floor. “He said to me, ‘you’re like an executive producer on a movie set. He’s the guy that funds the movie, and has final say in everything.’ Rob will come up with an idea, we’ll do it, and then I start making changes— and, we clash a lot about it, but we work well…”
“You take from baseball, but it doesn’t have to be the thing. You have new drive.”
‘It’s a Playpen’
As Matt, Rob and newest Gotham Rogue/scare actor, Jeremy Bixson, of Hauppauge, took The Messenger for a facility tour complete with spooky mazes and fiercely first-rate and “respawnable” laser-tag energy, we couldn’t help but focus on Guiliano revealing “he’s just getting back to normal now.” He seems like someone reborn with his new purpose, and knows this to be true twofold.
“It’s going to blow your mind,” Matt and Rob confirmed, equally self-aware that they’re now also circumstantially embroiled in the revitalization of laser-tag warfare with their “War Corpse” tactical attraction.
“The guns have speakers on them. They turn into 120 guns with sound effects. Kill streaks, ammo boxes, health boxes all over the place… I said, ‘you know I gotta buy speakers— when that chopper strike comes in, you hear and feel it. Classical, metal, anything you want to play it to. It’s a playpen.’”
Guiliano may have personally stopped giving batting lessons, but while others continue to under his watch before the total changeover is finished, he’s still learning many lessons himself.
Foremostly: to reunite with the kid in him, by saying yes to adventure.
“Me, I have ADHD, and the monotony of tossing the ball all day, it wasn’t letting me do anything anymore,” Guiliano said. “I’m a business guy, I walk into businesses and my mind operates by walking into places and thinking how businesses will grow, which will close and which will thrive.
Opening up [my mind], many things lead to another, and now the possibilities are endless.”
The more scintillating imagery he adds to his space he believes had grown complacent, the more he gets in touch with his earliest desire to entertain— and the people he serves can sense it.
“He just always wanted to give people a great experience,” said Angela Adamkiewicz, Guiliano’s fiancé. “And it really transformed into an all-year-round place, when he had his heart attack.
The baseball was too much for him to handle…it was a lot of stress on him, but it opened up this opportunity he never thought he’d ever do. Baseball was his life, his everything, and it really was his biggest passion. But every year, he’s always evolving.”
Every year, Guiliano and Frankenberg attend a convention in St. Louis to purchase Haunted House props. “Transforming the gym into a lounge came from that, also,” Adamkiewicz said.
“Now, we can get more elegant things,but also have a high-scale chill area” to balance with the provocativeness of the main area when Valentine’s Day haunts, St. Paddy’s Day haunts, Star Wars haunts, Christmas haunts and, ah yes, Halloween haunts, are still up and running.
With a “‘Till Death Do Us Party” tagline, business face-lifts and overhauls are sure to encompass some all-nighters, subsequent all-day recoveries and the overall challenges a niche-marketed business tends to confront.
The occasional ballplayer queued in the lobby being scared of the “coffins and gargoyles” aside, the trio behind Matt’s dream to make Gotham a more mass- consumable reality are ready for the road ahead and the next obstacles to come, whatever they may be. It’s all in a day’s work when you’re working out the kinks of signing well- known EDM talents like Boris, Cody and even locally-raised performers-made- good who’ve proven equally deserving of the platform to make an appearance at your venue.
But, it does not matter what acts walk through their doors past intentionally broken glass and velvet ropes separating “$80/$90 V.I.P” loungers from those signing up to get their arm-hairs raised. Every Gotham performer signals essentially no difference between long-in-operation city venues and the middle island nightspot on the come-up that they were given the privilege to pump up the volume within.
“Honestly it was a really great experience to DJ at Gotham,” said Steve Rimoli (pictured below), 27, of Hauppauge, also known as the DJ “One Deeper.” “The sound system, lighting, LED wall and DJ equipment are all top-notch. You would think it’s a venue in Manhattan or Brooklyn with the level of production they have. The staff were also a pleasure to work with, and the crowd immaculate. It’s crazy how a place I used to go to as a kid to play sports has turned into this amazing event venue. I would never expect it, but I’m so glad it’s happened!”
‘Till Death Do Us Party
The quasi-nightclub division of Gotham sports a liquor license, and V.I.P treatment includes staff taking your coat and providing you a drink while you wait for the main event— not dissimilar to the stellar service provided to those on line for seasonal haunts. Organizations and clubs can also host private parties in this space, like the League of Yes’ “Boozy Bingo,” or a dance held for children with disabilities, the proceeds from which went to charities that support them, and so forth.
Frankenberg adds that Gotham will also roll out film festivals, galas, and red- carpet premieres to support the new theater room’s 1080 HD screen on its LED Board, and also a 28-foot “drive-in” movie screen for special occasions of nostalgia override. The theater room has leather recliner chairs for all those seeking comfort while experiencing some good-old ’80s Sam Raimi-directed Evil Dead scares.
Man Meets Second Act
Recalling our Boy Meets World lead-in while compiling our latest long-form feature, it was hard to ignore the drama that’s hit the “rewatch podcast” playing in the background during our most effective writer’s sprints this calendar year. Variety reported last week that BMW lead Ben Savage “ghosted” his fellow cast-mates as he’s plunged into a political pursuit of Adam Schiff’s congressional seat in California.
Conversely, Matt Guiliano didn’t hesitate when a former client reached out to tell his story.
Congrats to Matt and his team on their new endeavor and for adopting a brand-new drive at this stage in their lives. And thank you for reminding The Messenger that there is life beyond the ballfield.
We are living proof.
“Gotham” is located at 1745 Express Drive in Hauppauge. They are currently hiring.
Contact [email protected] or call (631) 846-0363 for all event and booking
inquiries, and send your resume to [email protected] if seeking employment.
Instagram: @gotham_li | Facebook: Gotham Immersive Event Space | Website: GothamLi.com
